


Welcome to Jericho, Darling

by jenni3penny



Category: Lie to Me (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-15
Updated: 2016-05-15
Packaged: 2018-06-08 15:06:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,140
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6860026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jenni3penny/pseuds/jenni3penny
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"It's the smile he makes when he's fingernail flicked the match that lights the powder keg. It's his 'I'll-bring-down-the-bloody-walls-of-this-world-and-us-too' smile." Callian. Angsty arguing with a smidgen of fluff. Huge references to 'Sweet Sixteen'.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Welcome to Jericho, Darling

**Author's Note:**

  * For [flootzavut](https://archiveofourown.org/users/flootzavut/gifts), [passcrow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/passcrow/gifts).



“Wanna talk about Finch.” It's a slurred mess of accented and drunken mumbling but, Christ, hasn't she always been able to extrapolate his words, his intentions, his insecurities just by the iconic tip of his head and the way he speaks to her? He talks to her sometimes as though she's the only corporeal being in his world, like she's the only one allowed in the space of truth he creates around himself.

Hasn't it always been a bit of a curse and a cure, though? Being the one that _understands_ him?

“No, Cal, you don't,” she tells him succinctly but quietly, keeps her tone even.

“I do.” And his argument is far more emotionally made, not anywhere near the calm and cool tone he can often use in interviews or interrogations. Lately that buttered smoothness of his voice (his _heat_ ) has been churning up, accent thickening, his emotions hashing up his ability to just be still. It's been incrementally getting worse, gaining strength in how frenetic he seems in comparison to a year before, two. “What'd he do t'you?”

She's been afraid this would come back around on them, that some day he was going to remember that she'd been tipped off the pedestal he kept her up on. Some day he was going to stop being able to contain his curiosity, his frustration, his absolute need to know every truth about a situation - and this situation in particular. Just as he'd so long wondered about her going along with a Pentagon cover up before he'd finally unleashed that nagging frustration.

She'd known this would come back between them.

It had always been just a matter of timing and his deplorable lack of self control.

“I told you,” Gill answers softly, skimming a glance over the bottle that sits happily by his elbow, expensive Scotch and most of it obviously already swallowed. He's tipping a glass round and round on the desk blotter, using the pad of one finger to circle it dangerously close to toppling over.

Oh, _excellent_... Intentional Petulance: Lightman Defensive Tactic #372.

“Y'didn't,” he insists as he intentionally tips it a fraction too far and a slosh of liquid spills a crude color along one side of the overturned glass. “He touch you?”

But the color she hears in his voice isn't green, isn't jealousy.

It's murderous and muddy. Somewhere between black and brown and red.

Scotch and acid, in color and tone. It's obviously just going to be one of those nights.

No, Finch hadn't touched her, not beyond a greeting hand and a grip too hard on her smaller fingers. Finch, the so-long-unnamed man, had been more about physical posturing, stepping tactlessly into her space and driving her deeper into her own house, threatening the very center of her supposed safety. He'd been much more about being ominous, ridiculously molding himself into what he perceived a man clandestinely working for the government _should_ be.

“Not really, no.” He lifts his head as she speaks and he searches her face for the possibility of a lie. She lets him do it, even when the both of them know she's deflecting from the question. “It's been months since I told you - ”

“Right, but Em's reading 'To Kill a Mockingbird' again.”

And that makes absolute sense. Because it's just a little thing, one tiny slip of information, and his brain has grappled onto it and can't let go. Now he's focused, fussing and flustered all over something he's managed to keep lidded, just by way of an innocuous name in a book his daughter is reading. Now it's going to swallow up his attention and cloud over his judgment, taint all his thoughts and perceptions until he can manage to suss what he thinks is the final truth of the matter.

She makes a breathy noise of annoyance through her lips, shaking her head at him as she leans into the back of the chair opposite him and tries to relax, tries to find a balance to this conversation that could quickly spill over just as easily as that glass. “Don't offend my adoration of Atticus Finch by comparing him to that duplicitous piece of shit.”

“Ooooh, and so she curses. Wickedly so,” he quips as he pours himself another round. She mentally marks how far down the bottle he's gone and realizes as he re-caps it that this is a selfish drunk, a private self flagellation, and he doesn't plan to share. Selfish son of a bitch. If they're going to go there, he could at least offer her a nightcap. “Tell me what he did to you.”

“Nothing.” Her fingers tense on the chair back before she can catch the reaction but it's so much more than too late, because the flexing has drawn his attention and she sees the lift of an unshaven jaw and the merciless little smirk of victory that rises on his lips even as she continues. “Alec was there. I was fine.”

That grin goes directly to blood-thirsty and she doesn't necessarily have the time to tighten her shoulders against the onslaught. “Right. Sir Alec fuckin' Foster, bloody emotionally manipulative knight in soddin' armor.”

“You're on quite a roll tonight, aren't you?” she accuses quietly, purposefully keeping her voice patient – as she would with a patient. “Wanna disparage any other aspects of my life before I use the bottle as a bludgeon?”

He's staring at his drink to ignore the fact that she's spot on in her self defense. “Tell me, Gillian.”

“I did,” she murmurs quietly, watching his palm curl the glass.

“He touch you?” That (admittedly _beautiful_ ) right hand clenches and she can't help but watch how strongly it curves the glass. She can't help but study the controlled force and the way it flexes up his wrist, tightens his forearm.

“Not in the way you're so worried about.”

He nods a silent greeting to the glass after she's said it and it's as though they have a pact, the two of them. That they're partners now and she's out of this pairing for the foreseeable future. He nods once again in acceptance of her answer, trusting it despite the fact that he hadn't even looked up at her face while she was responding. He lifts the glass, studies the color of the liquid for a moment, and then throws it back. She watches the flex of his throat as he swallows, ignores the tingling on her skin as he snorts off a shaded laugh and wipes the back of his hand on his mouth.

“It's his fault, this. Finch.” The thunk of the empty glass to the desk accentuates his words, makes them seem more important just by the punctuation and the way he's fashioned them around the sound. “All of this.”

She doesn't ask what he means because, hell, tonight she's not sure she wants to know.

“You bein' the one I've gotta trust in,” he tells her anyhow. And now he's watching her face again, that dark smile hooking onto his lips again as his eyes swill darker. “Despite the fact you can obviously lie your arse off and then just fanny around the office and leave me swoonin' after ya. Can't do a damn thing about it, can I?”

This can't happen. They can't go to this place when he's so cynically slaughtering her patience and she's far too sober in comparison to be able to let go of her emotions.

She has to steer and veer them in another direction, takes a breath as he looks down. “Cal - ”

“When you been my savior since before we even fuckin' met and it's his fault I can't tell when you're tellin' me truth or lies, inn'it?”

“You're going to regret this conversation in the morning.” She says it quietly but it snaps his head up swiftly, so fast that she nearly startles as he pins a glare on her and winces his eyes thinner.

She's right, absolutely correct. He knows it.

They'll both regret each other by morning time.

They always do when these particular fights come along.

“Regret it before you even walked in the door, love,” Cal murmurs between them, his tone clearer than it had been and hashing lower. She suddenly seriously reconsiders whether or not he can be half as drunk as she'd assumed on half a bottle of Scotch. But then she knows he hasn't eaten today and she knows -

“But y'did walk in, yeah? Because one of those traitorous little bastards out there narced on me. Told teacher I was down the bottle and then - ”

“Cal - ”

“Then here comes Gillian Foster, lookin' like an avengin' angel who can still do delightfully dirty things with that pretty mouth of hers.” He's got anger in his eyes, filling up his voice, as he points at her. The glass is forgotten and the bottle is now just half a memory and his focus is fixed entirely (bitterly, so harshly) on her. “Deceitful mouth, though. Keeps secrets, locks up when it comes to the truth of things, doesn't it?”

“Cal.”

He's that stubborn little man in the story, raging, trumpeting truth, hoping to bring down Jericho's walls with sound and furious facts. No doubt that he thinks ( _feels_ , he isn't much thinking _at_ _all_ ) that if he can just sling enough righteous accusation her way, well, maybe she'll crack. Maybe he can create a fissure somewhere in the facade and bring their entire architecture of (unspoken) lies down to a rubbled mess. God, some days, she almost wishes he could... she wishes he hadn't so meticulously taught her how to block him so specifically.

“Tell me if he hurt you.” Maybe he isn't accusing so much as begging, prying, pleading. “I'll find him again.”

Maybe they're already destroyed. Even she isn't sure anymore.

“Maybe this time I'll kill 'im.” It's a whisper on him but it's sick and dark, loathing hides in his voice like a cancerous blot that's been growing too big between them for too long. “Then we'll be even, eh? Ruined my life the night he found your doorstep.”

He destroys her with that dark estimation of their relationship, that accusation made up of alcohol and hurt and love that's been twisting tighter toward strangling lately. It's a blitzkrieg of sorts, and he knew it even as the words formed from his lips. It levels her own love for him to something dusty and gritty and it feels as though he's standing somewhere in the middle of what's left of her, of them, in the middle of their long leftover war zone.

It's been a long time since she's allowed Cal Lightman to make her cry.

It's been a long time since she's allowed herself to feel for him in any overt way.

It's been an eternity since he's broken her heart like old bricks and crumbled mortar.

She feels herself sit heavily into the chair that's been invisibly labeled as her mid-night-chat chair since they'd moved into the space. The place where she usually feels so safely guarded and blissfully unguarded at once – where he usually pours her the glass that makes the pair and they're just best friends to each other, near lovers and happy, giddy with attachment and love that doesn't sour. The place where they used to be able to build up new dreams rather than tearing each other down to the framing bones.

“What do you want me to say?” she murmurs, shaking her head into the void of space between them, unable to meet his eyes with near tears.

“I want the fucking truth, Gillian.”

“Then ask for it instead of being a self-righteous prick,” she snaps back.

He seems taken by the sudden sharpness of her answer, both whipped surprised and, oddly, attracted by it. There's a certain lush sensuality to the new way he's looking at her and it's evident in the widening of his pupils, the quietness of his breath passing parted lips. He takes her in whole new, as though she's a distinctly different person than the woman who walked through his door. His lashes are longer than she'd ever realized before as he blinks. She watches his body shift weight through the almost-tears, he tips farther to one side as he wipes his fingertips against his palms and his head shakes slightly even as he keeps staring her down.

“Why save me?”

Good Christ Almighty, took him yards of pride to ask it. That much she knows.

What she doesn't have a firm grasp on is the actual answer to the question.

But what she does know, deeply, is that it had never been a question to her – whether she should or should not help him? It had always, always, been her absolute intention to safeguard him from himself, from his possible disastrous actions, from the damage he could do to his own unwitting and innocent family. Honestly, what else was she supposed to do in that situation, even before she'd met him? Been oddly charmed by him and his... irascible defensive paranoia? She knows, even as he grins at her for some unnamed reason, brow arched, that she had never really given herself any other choice but doing exactly what she had done.

And he can be perennially pissed at her for it if he likes - she would have done the same, over and again, even knowing this ending.

“For Zoe and Emily.” She fidgets on their names, uncontrollably and uncomfortably. She shifts and feels him go hawkish in watching, his eyes flinching thinner as he notes how self-conscious she's feeling, and especially when it comes to this particular subject. “For Emily. Who was the same age as that little dead girl.”

It's as though they both know it's not _necessarily_ a lie... but it's not a whole truth either.

And the edge has worn off that chilled-sharp smile, and now it's just fading.

(And it was never _just_ for Emily, was it?)

“The first time, sure,” Cal murmurs past a dying grin, his face becoming more passive again as he watches her reflexively lift her shoulders into forced confidence. “Why keep goin'? Why keep at it, Gill?”

“Force of habit.”

“Bollocks,” he answers starkly, his face scrunching into disagreement as he reaches for a tissue and turns back toward her, handing it over with a searching glance. “Why? Tell me.”

She could tell him. Or she could make him squirm on it.

But he's going to just keep pushing and pushing and _pushing_... and something has softened him in the mention of Emily. Maybe that reminder of all the things he loves in one human being has made him gentler in this discussion. Even if it is only a temporary reprieve from his anger.

“Because despite your ability to be especially cruel to the people closest to you, I do love you.” Downed walls and the bare-bones-framing of her entire vulnerability. She's never meant it in the saying (I _do_ love _you_ ) as much as she does in this moment, while she accepts the tissue and ruins what's left of her make-up. “Heartless son of a bitch.”

Silencing Cal Lightman is an event for the history books, she thinks as she wipes at her eyes. Biblical in proportion, really. Because he is utterly speechless and his face reads with an open nothingness. He is surprised, confused, astounded – but he is primarily unable to accept the very concept that she loves him. She knows that, has known that. He's just finally realizing it.

“Alec was emotionally manipulative?” Gill snorts a new frustration between them, blinks away from how interested he is in staring at her. His lips are parted as though they're trying to remind him that oxygen is a physical necessity but his myriad eyes have shut themselves up, shut her out. Once again. “Open your goddamn eyes, Cal. 'Blind spot' my ass.”

He finally blinks and probably because his body has control of itself even if his mind is spun-out. “Gill - ”

“No, it's my turn now, isn't it?” she asks peevishly, just as accusingly as he'd been earlier about Finch and fate and dark doorsteps and lives ruined. “Yes, I kept information from you. Technically, by omission, I lied.”

“Why?” he asks with a squinting.

“Because you're cocky, and reckless, and for as brilliant as you are... you can be exceptionally stupid sometimes.”

She knows that half flick of a self-deprecating smile before it even lights over his lips, knows it's coming and exactly how to find it in this darkness. “Y'didn't even know me.”

“I knew you. I've always known you, Cal.” Distractedly her fingers worry against the dampened tissue and she doesn't care enough anymore to cover that fidgeting action. “You thought that book was a plant? To soften you up so you'd spill your secrets to me?”

“You read me,” he realizes with a shaded murmur. “Literally.”

“Like a fucking book.” He looks at her dumbfounded, astounded, and she isn't sure if it's because she's so loudly cursed throughout his office or because of the realization that's been bared between them. Yes, she's loved his science, his brilliance and brain. But, hell, she didn't read the book to learn the _science_. She'd learned the man first. “Word choice, particular idioms, repeated expressions. The dedication alone said - ”

“It was for Em.”

“I know that,” she snipes back, tries to breathe more patience from her lungs to her voice. “I knew that.”

“You been playin' me from the start.”

Gill considers the words, shrugs minutely into them and swallows down guilt. “And you've been lying to me for years.”

“About what exactly?” He's looking at her like she can't possibly be correct, like she's being an absolute loon for accusing him of something so conceptually ridiculous. That _he_ would lie to her. That the man who sought truth in every situation would spend near a decade keeping a lying little secret to himself and that she could possibly even know if he were.

“Are you in love with me, Cal?” she asks clearly, forcing herself to hold his eyes, forcing herself not to look for any other reaction but the sudden flinch in his eyes.

“Yes.”

The whole room thuds stop-still for a moment but not because she's a bit surprised by the answer – it's entirely his actual admission, swift and sure, that's startled her up. She expected to have to pry it out of him someday, torture him or strategically trick him up somehow... It's a surprise to have an answer that she 'd already known given so openly and freely from a man who keeps his entire life locked behind his own eyes.

“And you've bloody well known it for always.” His voice is bittered again, still sick with something sour.

“Not always.” Gill counters quietly, shaking her head back and forth as she fingers the thin tissue.

“You knew it and drew that shitty little line between us anyhow, didn'tcha?” Cal accuses, though his pitch doesn't rise. He isn't getting louder, he's just getting darker, bleaker.

Her eyes drop and she studies how raggedly she's worried at the tissue, crumples it into a rolled ball into the center of her palm and flexes her fist around it as she exhales. “I was married.”

“Don't see Alec Foster's ring on your finger now, love.” He takes up the strength of his own argument quickly, as though he's had this very discussion in his head, over and again. And they both have, haven't they? They've both thought through and over and around this subject and never come to a simple equation that could solve the problem – not on their own. The solution to them, in combination, is ever an infinite mystery. “And Burns?”

But she can't produce a solution that doesn't break something as equally as it puts them back together.

“Zoe? And Clara? Wallowski?” And her pride, the strength of confidence she has (admittedly because she usually has him and his assurance beside her), it won't let her back down this time.

They need an answer to this problem. They need a solution and the angled schematics to a new foundation, something better built than what's falling down around them.

“Newton's Third Law,” he murmurs at her with a bitter wincing of his shoulders, voice cool and bereft of his usual love for her. “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.”

She needs new walls to survive the rioting loudness of him, the constant sound of him surrounding her – knowing her, every little goddamn flicker of possible emotion or desire.

She wonders if they know each other so well that love has become sickness, that loyalty has twisted into utter exhaustion.

She wonders if he'd love her so bitterly, so stringently, if they'd just gotten drunk and fucked each other up along a wall. Christ, any wall would have done. If, long ago, they'd just gotten out of their systems and taken the awkward six months to get past it. She would have hated herself for it at points but, God, maybe living with silently loving him would be easier if they had.

Because desire, wanting, adoration and affection – all these ached things are souring them. “Go to hell, Cal.”

He smiles wide and it's that Cheshire grin of his, it's the smile that's twisted and malformed on his lips. It's the smile he makes when he's fingernail flicked the match that lights the powder keg. It's his 'I'll-bring-down-the-bloody-walls-of-this-world-and-us-too' smile. But it fades as fast as its come and she watches the fall of it from his mouth, it saddens itself off his lips as he turns his jaw into his palm and shakes his head with just a barely perceptible shift of movement. She watches it come and go, she watches him realize its arrival and she sees the moment when he sends it away, so long, farewell.

It's a shocking testament to his actual love that he takes that moment, a breathing second to review his own emotions before his chin digs deeper into his palm and he swings his glance back to her. He shrugs again but this time it's nothing smug, there's no accusation. “Come with me. Can't go on my own.”

He's shifted the placement of their feet in this argument suddenly, and he's done it by way of a hidden knife up into her ribs. At least Judas had the decency to kiss and kill at once. This son of a bitch spins small betrayals like they're tattered love notes. He's always known that the one thing she cannot manage is leaving his side. So, of course he'd ply on that fact, tug on that edge. Of course he'd use it against her, even while he quietly reaches for the box of tissues behind him and sets them to the desk between them. He nods his head toward them like a wilted olive branch – it's the best he can do, yeah? Because Cal Lightman can't apologize, can't show remorse or fallibility.

Cal Lightman can't generally be weak, even for her.

“Don't like goin' anywhere without you, Gillian.” He whispers it, so quiet. Cal whispering is always the imminence of something monumental and she blinks as he plucks her another tissue and stretches it toward her. A breath of near hysterical laughter comes off him and he chuckles quieter than expected. And his office has become echoing. “Ain't that the sick twist? You're my best friend. Can't love and lose you at once. Can't love and have you either. S'fuckin' purgatory.”

“We're losing each other anyhow, Cal.” She takes the tissue in her empty had and stares at it a moment, folds it in her fingers and she knows he's watching the movement before she scrubs it along her already sensitive eyes. She's going to look like hell in the morning, she's going to look battle worn. “Aren't we?”

“Can't lose you, Gill,” he murmurs with a newfound sincerity, a softness that is quieting things down around her. He's stilling the riot he's become just for her and that surprises her. The fact that he's somehow seen that she can't shoulder complete destruction tonight and so he's actually diverted it, he's tamed himself and gentled his anger back toward something tenable. “You're what I've got.”

“Not my name on the wall, is it?” He flinches his eyes shut in response to her quiet statement and her head lowers as the realization that the words have actually come out hits her square in the chest. “Sorry. Below the belt.”

His body falls back into his chair after a moment, head tipped into the back so that he can close his eyes to the ceiling. She isn't sure how much of his pause is hurt and how much of it is just a breathing mental break from where they've found themselves in this conversation. And despite the fact that she's live-wire-livid with him, she can't help but lift a hooded glance over the expanse of his chest and shoulders and the way his Adam's Apple jerks as he forces himself to swallow once, twice, a pause and one more time. It's moments before he tips his jaw back down and opens his pretty eyes in her direction. She finds grace on him when he looks at her that way... flushed from drink and wanton but always, always, terrified that he's going to destroy her.

It's paradoxical, that look.

The one that says he can't _love_ her so he'll just love on her.

He can't be _with_ her, so he'll just be beside her.

“Whole conversation's been pretty poor taste,” he admits with apology in his tone, on his face. She knows what remorse looks like on Lightman, seen it enough. And when it's sincere, God... it's the most beautiful thing on him. It's boyish and sweet and she hates trusting it but... just can't help herself, can she? “Lacking in tact, eh?”

Gill huffs off a sad breath, “What are we doing to each other?”

“Love.” It's a whisper of a thing and it's so small, barely even built and quiet as he leans back into his side of the desk. He firmly plants his jaw into his palm again and suddenly the whole conversation seems to have been about nothing but _this_ – this thing he has, this small little foundation that he's trying to build up between them by wrecking old worlds and re-using the pieces. Never was about Finch, not really, she realizes. It was just that Cal, because he is _Cal_ , can't begin a conversation about love without also referencing a sort of hatred. “It is love, darling. Just not the pretty side of it.”

She can't do anything but blink at him because this time, this time she's the one gone stunned-quiet to the mention of loving each other.

She never thought he'd get to this place.

Not without a map, two flashlights and her prodding his ass ten thousand times along the way.

(And she'd incrementally given up on prodding, hadn't she? A little more with each Clara, each Poppy and Naomi, each fight and diatribe and dig at her character.)

She blinks again as she realizes he's chuckling at himself, rubbing the full break of his palm roughly against stubble. Her face flicks confusion over him, surprise and maybe even hurt.

“Funny isn't it?” he asks seriously, morbidly, and she realizes he doesn't think it's funny at all. Hysterical and reactionary laughter passing his lips because he doesn't know what to do or say in the face of her silence. “S'hilarious.”

“I don't find this nearly as amusing as you seem to,” she replies, more a tired response than it would usually be. There's no frustration to it. Just sheer mental exhaustion, really.

“Burns implied I couldn't use the word,” Cal offers softly and her head lifts into it, the mention of Burns putting her on guard. At least until he smiles sheepishly and shrugs his glance away. “'Specially in regards t'you.”

“Love?”

He stands after she's asked it and the movement comes as a surprise, something she watches warily from her chair. His movements are tamed in comparison to how he's been lately, far slower and gentler than expected as he turns the edge of the desk and comes into her space. Normally she'd guard her space with him, brace up that wall and force him to stand on a line that she's created. Not because she doesn't want him crossing it but because, just once, she wants it to be her choice when he does. Because she has walls, lines, between them for a goddamn reason. To save whatever is left of her own sanity, maybe. To safeguard whatever he hasn't trampled of her emotions and, Jesus, as silly romantic as is sounds in her own head... she assumes that line is the only thing that's ever saved her from him being the man to singularly demolish her heart. He is capable of it and she knows it, he knows it. It's what terrifies the both of them backwards.

“Yeah,” he admits as he leans back slanted onto the desk, keeping just enough space between them that she can breathe but his legs are crossed and the one that isn't holding his weight is nudging closer. And it's sorta sickly cute that he can't _not_ touch her somehow, so he's gotta nudge the toe of his boot against her heel and mess around. “Love.”

“Can you?”

He's got his hands stuffed in his pockets as he shrugs and stares at their feet, paleness on him as he tests her and turns the toe of his shoe under her heel, lifts against her arch to play. “I'm the one keeps bringin' it up, ain't I?”

“Drunkenly.” Gill presses her foot down to still the movement, her eyes fixed on his features as he realizes that she's forcing him to face her instead of deflecting from the seriousness of the conversation.

“Not nearly as drunk as I could be,” he tells her with a lift of his right hand and a pause. And it's that pause, that trepidation that has her leaning her head toward the reach of his fingers rather than away. Because, if they're anything to each other, it's comfort. If they've ever gotten anything right it's being the leaning shoulder or the hug in the darkness and she can't deny that she wants that touch of reparation. She wants his hand sliding back through her hair and along the side of her head so that he can brace the base of her skull and just hold her. “Y'know I love you. Why keep waitin' for me to tell you?”

His fingers are warm and sturdy against her scalp, not pressing or insistent. Just still. And quiet.

And that was, possibly, the best way he could have ever said it.

Because, at the very least, it's sincere and honest and clean and forthright.

“Because people need to be told, Cal.” She turns her cheek into his stretching and the surplus of heat that radiates off him seems to embrace how chilled they'd become. She leans the side of her face against a tattooed forearm and exhales. “We're not all diviners. We can't all just extrapolate information like that from a twitch in the cheek or - ”

“Don't gimme that.” He'd flexed her closer in argument and he slumps his body lower against the desk edge, cradling her tight as his mouth lands on the top of her head and something feels like it's been rebuilt inside her. Something sturdy and weight-baring and strong as he rubs his lips in her hair. “You knew.”

“Yes, I did.” She feels him sigh off relief toward her temple as she says it and she figures it's because she's used a tone of warmth and her own relief rather than accusation. “I do.”

“Then why we fightin', huh?” His hand strokes from the back of her neck and up under her jaw and it feels like nothing has changed and everything has changed all at once. He slides so easily into comfortably touching her, as though it's always been this intimate and loving. As though they've never loved each other onward toward nearly hating each other. “You should be naked somewhere, lettin' me love you.”

She can't help but smile at the words, primarily because he can't help being an impish little shit in saying them.

And she's always actually loved that bit of him - his complete inability to curb his own mischievous nature.

“We'll kill each other, Cal,” she whispers into how gently (but firmly) he cups her jaw into his hand and there's a smile on his lips that says he'd earnestly like to see her definition of death. His eyes give her that cheeky little ' _aye-aye, let's get on with it then_ ' before his smile does and he looks over her lips as he skids his thumb on the bottom one.

“Only got one person I trust to kill me, darling.” This is his way of saying ' _I love you, I do_ ' - with a quieted honesty and a searching look over her mouth before he meets her eyes with affection.

“She's just doin' it slower than I'd like. In small doses, like a poison.”

Gill arches him a more serious look at the accusation. “And you'd rather go out with a bang?”

“Don't be trite,” he asserts sharply, shakes his head hard on the argument as he grips her jaw higher toward his. “M'not makin' light of it, Gill. You're killin' me. Even when y'don't realize it.”

“I don't know if we can do this.”

However, what she does know is that every time he touches her face she falls in love with him in a whole new way and it's gotta stop or it's gotta stay. Because she doesn't have the constitution to keep walls up or down, she doesn't have the strength to keep pushing him back - and she doesn't necessarily want to, really. Hell, she wants him to cross that line but... but only if he plans on staying on her fucking side of it. There's no dancing back and forth anymore. It's not play-time anymore.

“We're not gonna survive the not-doin',” he tells her truly, inching closer to kissing her and she knows it's coming. She doesn't stop it, doesn't want to, doesn't need to if he's going to _really_ mean it this time. “Are we?”

“No, probably not.”

It's a sort of sad smile that he lays onto her lips but also one of sheer acceptance. He kisses her slowly but with the knowledge and silent admittance that he's going to love her regardless of what may come next, or tomorrow, or even in years. She feels her throat moan into how gentle it is at first and that encourages him, sharpens his senses in the kissing and suddenly he's got both hands on her face and he's owning her space and if the chair had the room for both of them she's fairly sure he'd be curled up beside her while he sucks on her tongue. His knee drives hers apart with confidence and urgency and that movement matches the groan he sends against her teeth. That movement is the shift that has her hands catching into his shirt and tugging him down lower over her. She strokes toward his shoulders and feels him shiver into kissing her harder, his tongue tracing Scotch onto her teeth as she digs them up closer to each other.

He only ends the kiss to breathe and his mouth, his quiet laughter, they both rest on the corner of her half smile.

“Up to you, Gill.” His kissed words taste of Scotch and doting, unleashed affection in the rub of his lips across hers as he hums a questioning little sound and then ups his jaw. “This bloke's goin' down either way, eh?”

It's all in the whisper of the implication as he leans entirely over her, hands finding the chair to balance his weight. It's all in the assertion that he's simultaneously destroyed and rebuilt by her, with her, for her, regardless of any particular decision she may make.

“It's your choice, darling.” His trepidation is in his eyes despite the fact his voice is warmed up and hushed near her lips and still the taste of Scotch and adoration on her tongue, her teeth.

It's a reconstruction of sorts is what it is.

God, he's trying. He's truly, honestly, making an effort to build on something here.

Starting with small tools and the promise that this is her decision.

She lifts her head with a winsome smile and reaches again for the only sound foundation she's ever really had.

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to Floot and PassCrow for the beta-ing! They did what they could with what they had!


End file.
